BACK TO METHUSALEH

Evening Star, Issue 18502, 8 December 1923, Page 11

BACK TO METHUSALEH

HR SHAW'S RELIGION. Mr St. John Ervine writes fn a review, highly appreciative for the most part, of Mr G. B. Shaw’s play, ‘Back to Methusaleh ’:

For this is not a play so much os a gospel. Hear what comfortable words Bernard Slmw saith unto all mankind: The Newly-Born; “ Wliat is your destiny?” The He-Ancient: “To bo immortal.” Tho She-Ancient: " The day will como when there will be no people, only thought.” The He-Ancient: “And that will be.

life eternal.” life, in the words of the ghost of Lilith, is to become a “ whirlpool in pure intelligence ” instead of a " whirlpool in pure force,” ‘‘Of life only is there no end; and though of its million starry _ mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and’though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.” Man has to be refined out of all sensual pleasure. Books, pictures, rnusio, sculpture, food, drink—oil these must go, so that his bodiless mind may whirl in pure intelligence for ever. A countryman of mine, who objected to instrumental music in church services, was asked what lie would do when he wa-o presented with a harp in heaven. “ They’d never offer tho like o’ that to a man of my principles,’’ ho replied; “ but if they did I’d just hand it back to them.” _ That stern Presbyterian will run no risk of being affronted with music in Mr Shaw’s heaven. He will spend eternity in contemplation, but what he will k 0 contemplating or what will result from bis contemplation Mr Shaw alone knows, although he does not tell us. Man, wo are assured, is influenced not by fils experience, but_by his prospects. - None of us loams anything from the past, but we are profoundly moved by the future. If wo could live, say, for’three centuries, our behaviour would be vastly different from what it k now, when we cannot count on living for one century. Savvy Barnabas, tho daughter of one’of the Brothers Barnabas, who preach tho gospel of longevity, asserts that if she had only twenty years in which to live she would not trouble to learn onything. Savvy Is talking through her hat. Our actions are not conditioned by our prospects of life, but by the nature inside us, and that nature is not appreciably affected by the length of our years. If the fkiwys of twenty-three years’ existence will not learn anything, neither will the Savvysof a thousand years’ existence. Longevity in itself is of no particular service to mankind. Mr Shaw’s Adam was several centuries old when we last saw him in Mesopotamia, but be had not got a twentieth part of tho splendor which _ belonged to Keats and Shelley, who died in their early manhood. Mr Shaw is surely making an unwarrantable assumption when bo asserts that man will become progressively wiser as be becomes older, provided he gels time in which to mature. I boo nothing in human life to justify the belief that a flighty-minded person will become a seri-ous-minded person merely by the prolongation of his existence. If longevity is added on to some sort of operation for trepanning, then perhaps mankind may be brought into that conditon of high, though inactive, ratiocination which seems so superb to Mr Shaw, but hardly otherwise, unless Heaven directly interposes, ns it did in the celebrated case of St. Paul.